In The Warmth of Other Suns, renowned journalist Isabel Wilkerson captures the personal drama and historical significance of the Great Migration, in which more than six million Black Southerners moved to the North and the West between 1915 and 1970. The book looks at the Great Migration by following three of its participants from childhood to the grave: Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster.
The three protagonists represent both the remarkable diversity within the Great Migration and the common desires, experiences, and sorrows that all of its participants shared. Before migrating, Ida Mae was a plantation sharecropper with little education, Robert was a brilliant surgeon who married into one of Black America’s most elite families, and George was a star student from a small town who became a fruit picker when he couldn’t afford to finish college. They followed different routes in different decades: Ida Mae moved up the middle of the country, from Mississippi to Chicago, in the 1930s; George traveled up the East Coast, from Florida to New York, in the 1940s; and Robert migrated west, from Louisiana to California, in the 1950s. Yet all three left the South after frightening brushes with the violence of Jim Crow, all three followed friends and family elsewhere in pursuit of a better life elsewhere, and all three struggled to adapt to their destination cities, though they ultimately made these cities their new homes.
Wilkerson opens Part One of her book by describing the dizzying mix of anxiety and hope that Ida Mae, George, and Robert feel when they begin their perilous journeys out of the South. Then, she explains how the Great Migration has profoundly shaped the U.S.—for instance, it explains why cities like Detroit, Baltimore, and Oakland have such high Black populations today, and why so many Black musicians, artists, and writers rose to national prominence in the 20th century. Wilkerson spent 15 years interviewing more than 1,200 people and writing this book in order to tell the underappreciated and “distinctly American” story of how so many—including her own parents—left the South in pursuit of freedom and happiness.
In Part Two: Beginnings, Wilkerson portrays her protagonists’ early lives in the South and explains why they decided to migrate. Ida Mae grows up on a plantation in rural Chickasaw County, Mississippi. Her father dies when she is a child, leaving her family destitute, and she marries the sharecropper George Gladney as a teenager. The Great Migration has been ongoing for more than a decade, ever since northern manufacturers started recruiting thousands of Southern Black workers to fill labor shortages during World War I. Working in the North presents an appealing alternative to life in the South, where Black people are stuck using low-quality, segregated services and subject to deadly violence when they break the unwritten rules of Jim Crow (such as always obeying and deferring to white people). They’re also stuck in poverty by design. For example, every year, the plantation owner tells George Starling’s sharecropper grandfather, John, that they “broke even”—meaning that John never gets paid. Many sharecroppers face worse situations and end up mired in ever-deeper debt. George wants out of this system. He’s mischievous but also brilliant, and he finishes two years of college—at which point his father can no longer afford tuition and makes him drop out. George marries his girlfriend Inez just to spite his father (who decides never to send him back to school) and starts working in the local citrus groves. Finally, Robert Foster grows up in Monroe, Louisiana, where his parents are poor but highly respected teachers and community leaders. Everyone calls him by his middle name, Pershing. He loves going to the movie theater, even though he’s stuck in the filthy, segregated Black section, and he dreams of having the same rights as his white neighbors.
Eventually, adverse circumstances drive Ida Mae, George, and Pershing (Robert) out of the South. Ida Mae struggles to weather the backbreaking life of a cotton picker and housewife, and her eldest daughter dies in infancy. When her neighbor’s turkeys go missing, the plantation owner Edd Pearson blames, kidnaps, and tortures her husband’s innocent cousin, Joe Lee. In 1937, Ida Mae and her husband decide to leave Mississippi and follow Ida Mae’s sister, Irene, to Milwaukee. Later, during World War II, George Starling briefly works at a factory in Detroit, but race riots break out there, so he returns to Florida to pick citrus. He also starts organizing informal labor unions at the groves. This wins better wages for the workers, but also infuriates the grove owners, who start planning to lynch him. He decides to escape to New York. Meanwhile, Pershing attends the elite Morehouse College, where he starts dating Alice, the daughter of Rufus Clement, the President of Atlanta University and an eminent leader in the Black community. Their wedding is “the social event of the season.” Pershing goes on to medical school in Nashville and joins the Army as a surgeon on a base in Austria. The other soldiers look down on him, but at least it’s better than segregated Monroe, where his brother Madison—also a doctor—has few resources and isn’t even allowed to enter the hospital. After leaving the Army, Pershing decides to move to sunny California.
In the brief Part Three: Exodus, Wilkerson describes how Ida Mae and George travel to Milwaukee and New York by train, while Pershing—who decides to start going by Robert—drives out west toward California. He spends the first night with a friend in Houston, but on the second night, in legally integrated Arizona, several hotels refuse to give him a room. Disappointed, he has no choice but to drive straight through the night.
In Part Four: The Kinder Mistress, Wilkerson describes her protagonists’ new lives in their destination cities. Ida Mae ends up staying in “the great belching city” of Chicago, where her husband eventually finds steady work at the Campbell Soup factory, and she gets a job as a hospital aide. But they are stuck living on the overcrowded, all-Black side of town, where they pay exorbitant rents to live in dilapidated shacks. When Black families try to move elsewhere, white neighbors bomb their houses or start riots. The same happens in New York, but George Starling has savings and uses them to buy a brownstone in the poorer section of Harlem. He gets hired as a porter on the same train that he took to New York, and so he spends his days helping the next generation of migrants move north. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Robert (Pershing) spends a few years at a dreary job doing checkups for an insurance company before starting his own private practice. He struggles to find patients, but eventually, he becomes popular among fellow Southern migrants and even starts treating Black celebrities like Ray Charles. He buys a mansion and starts performing surgeries in a local hospital, where he hears the other doctors brag about their trips to Las Vegas. He decides that he must go, and even though most Vegas hotels don’t accept Black guests, a friend of a friend helps him get a room.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Ida Mae, George, and Robert build their family lives. George’s marriage is rocky, he has an affair and ends up having another son, and his other children fall victim to the vices of the North—his son Gerard becomes a drug dealer, and his daughter Sonya gets pregnant at age 13. (Ironically, they both move back to Florida.) Robert’s wife and daughters struggle to adapt to their new life in Los Angeles, and he spends more and more of his time gambling. But Ida Mae’s marriage is stable, and her children are loyal and responsible. Her family works together to buy a house in a beautiful neighborhood—until white families leave the area, the city stops investing in it, and crime skyrockets. All three protagonists help friends and family migrate after them, too. But they don’t visit home very often, and they have mixed feelings whenever they do return.
Meanwhile, the protagonists also play witness to the growing civil rights movement. Ida Mae attends famous lynching victim Emmett Till’s funeral and sees Martin Luther King, Jr. speak in Chicago, but when her coworkers strike at the hospital, she chooses not to join. George works tirelessly to raise money and support Southern protestors, and he risks losing his job by encouraging Black train passengers to stay in integrated cars in the South. But Robert mostly avoids politics, preferring to throw extravagant parties—he spends a whole year planning the perfect one for his own birthday.
Part Five: Aftermath picks up in 1970, when conditions have improved in the South and the Great Migration has ended. The book’s three protagonists are aging and well-integrated into their communities, but after their spouses die, they take stock of their life decisions and regrets. Ida Mae is truly happy: she’s surrounded by a loving family, deeply connected to God, and grateful for every day of her life. Robert is successful and highly popular, but he still feels anxious all the time and gambles compulsively. He leaves private practice to work in a hospital, but the administration sidelines him, and he furiously sues them before accepting retirement. Finally, George feels he wasted his life by never finishing college and spending his entire career as a railroad porter. He deeply regrets his failed marriage and feels profoundly disappointed in his children. Yet, like Ida Mae and Robert, he knows that leaving the South was the right decision.
In the 1990s, near the end of their lives, the three protagonists meet Wilkerson and tell her their stories. She grows close to all three: she drives Robert to medical appointments, visits George when he’s dying in the hospital, and accompanies Ida Mae on her first trip back to Chickasaw County in decades. Their stories will live on forever in this book, even though none of them survive to see it get published.
In her Epilogue, Wilkerson contrasts the conventional assumptions about the Great Migration with social science research showing that it allowed migrants to achieve higher levels of income, education, health, and freedom. She concludes that the Great Migration represents another crucial step in the long American tradition of migrating for freedom and to “pursue some vision of happiness.”
